How Strange, Innocence
by ShivaLiszt
Summary: Waking up on a ledge in a village of paranoid ninja with no knowledge of who you are or where you came from and not even speaking the same language as them can be quite the problomatic situation. Quite the problem indeed..
1. First Breath After Coma

**I've decided to try my hand at this one. I have had several fictions that have influenced me to write this, and both have very heavy influences, so if there's a theme that you find is very familiar it might be because you are thinking of the same story lol. So, here you go.**

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><p><strong>Chapter One:<br>**_**First Breath After Coma**_

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><p><strong>Unknown Date, Unknown Time<br>****Unknown Location**

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><p>What is going on? No other thought than that was flying through my mind. I woke up on a ledge at least three hundred feet in the air on the side of a frickin' mountain. Did I mention I'm scared of heights? Well, now you know. I tried to think of how I got there.<p>

Nothing.

Blank.

Nothing was coming to mind . What had I been doing before this? No. it's not possible. Oh, my God. I can't remember anything. Who am I, what's my name? Where am I from? What am I doing here?

My vision started pulsing with little black dots as I leaned forward onto my knees and started hyperventilating.

I looked over the side of my little ledge, glanced, really. The wind buffeted at me and made my eyes start to water. The pitch blackness of night surrounded me and the city below me sparkled and shimmered with thousands of little lights, each one blurring together with the tears filling my rapidly drying out eyes. My head felt light and packed full of fluff. I was scared to move an inch, the ledge was that tiny. I screamed for help but the wind caught my words and threw them away. I screamed again and again. No one came. No one responded.

No, this just can't be possible. There's no way. I felt the world tilt as my vision bled fully into black, the shimmering twinkling lights of the city below disapearing.

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><p>The next time I woke up it was dark. I managed to force my eyes open and I could see nothing. What I could feel, however, was that I was sitting in a chair with my hands tied behind my back and a blindfold over my eyes, along with a gag in my mouth.<p>

I moved my head slightly, trying to ascertain where I was. Someone behind me spoke in a deep rough male voice. I couldn't understand what he said.

I hear someone step around in front of me. The gag was roughly yanked out leaving a bad taste of rotten eggs.

I cracked my chapped lips. "Water, please," I moaned out softly.

My cheek stung and my head snapped to the side. They, whoever they were, had slapped me. I was feeling nauseous and I could feel the blood rushing through my temples and my smarting cheek.

Several voices spoke around me, one shouting. I cringed into the seat. A more menacing deep voice started talking and saying what sounded like questions.

Then repeated again. "Anata deska?" A large hand roughly grabbed my chin. "_Anata deska?"_ It repeated louder this time.

I started crying. "I'm sorry," I whimpered. "I don't understand you."

"Anata deska?" Louder again, bordering on a shout.

"Please, I don't understand you," I pleaded. That just earned me another blow to the face and a punch to the stomach. The air fushed out of my lungs.

"_**Anata deska?**_" Was repeated once again, a shout this time, and accompanied by someone kicking over the chair I was in. A lot of other words were repeated but I only recognized those two as they were the most repeated.

I was crying; I didn't care. I kept begging them to let me go and they kept screaming at me in that foreign language of theirs. At times they would hit me, kick me, I wasn't sure. At some point my chair was righted again and a knife was held to my neck. It sliced into my bare skin as whoever held it questioned me again. My wrist snapped as they hauled me back up into a sitting position but it only joined the rest of the hurt I was feeling. Blood pounded in my ears. I couldn't think.

Sometimes when they asked a question it would be delivered in a soft tone of voice, like they were merely asking about the time of day, or if I would prefer spaghetti or pizza for lunch. Sometimes they would scream at me like they were about to put a bullet in my head. Every question was accompanied by a blow.

Always.

I almost broke in that place. I still wonder how I didn't.

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><p><strong>Sooo, unless I get writer's block, I'll try to update semi-regularly, but that pesky writer's block always makes it hard:p<strong>


	2. Catastrophe and the Cure

**Chapter Two:  
><strong>**_Catastrophe and the Cure_**

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><p><em>Sometimes I was so messed up and didn't have a clue. I ain't winning anyone over—I wear it just for you—I've got your name written here in a rose tattoo. In a rose tattoo, in a rose tattoo, I've got your name written here, in a rose tattoo.<em>—Dropkick Murphys

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><p><strong>Unknown Date, Unknown Time<strong>

**Unknown Location**

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><p>It was actually rather amazing how that blindfold hadn't shifted once, hadn't moved once in this whole ordeal. Even after every time they'd hit me in the face, knocked my chair over, punched me, that blindfold stayed on.<p>

I assessed what I could. A something wet trickled down my cheek from a stinging diagonal area. Most likely a gash on my head. One of my shoulders was dislocated and the other broken at the upper arm and the wrist along with several fingers. I kept cataloging the various injuries of nicks and bruises all over me.

The door creaked open behind me, maybe twenty feet away, and heavy booted feet came through. Three people, maybe four. Two stopped a good ways behind me while a third walked closer and came to rest in front of my little chair.

I braced myself for the first blow.

It never came.

A large hand gently came to rest on the crown of my head. This was a psyche game, I knew it. After all the blows there was no wa—

_Oh, God, the pain._

What seemed like a spike of energy rammed its way through my forehead into the center of my brain.

Oh, but it _hurt!_

Underneath all the pain something moved. A pressure, like something or someone was in there with me. Blonde and a glimpse of a face that didn't come through my vision flashed through. I didn't know how but someone was in my mind.

My surroundings became white as far as I could see, even the sky above me.

I jumped and turned when I heard a noise behind me only to find a man standing right behind me. He was taller than me, the top of my head just reached his chin, with cold blue eyes that made me even more afraid and blonde hair pulled back into a short ponytail.

I started to run and had only begun to move to take my first step when he grabbed my arm and threw me to the ground and pinned me there. I struggled as much as I could but he placed his hand on my forehead and images started moving around us, flashing before my eyes. I wasn't controlling them, I tried to make them stop but I had no control. The central theme of them all was that they were convoluted, sound was broken up, vision split with white spots in random places, glitching and corrupted like computer data after a virus had swept through and destroyed everything it could but there were fragments remaining. An image would glitch and fail only to have another one immediately called up.

I had to get away from the blond man to make it stop, I just knew it. I couldn't, though. I was pinned to the ground and was going nowhere. I had to make it stop. I had to.

"Get out," I whimpered, "get out."

He wouldn't leave and every time I spoke he only glared. Images flashed by even faster, broken sounds of speech. I begged and pleaded for him to stop, tears running from my eyes.

Before I knew it I was crying, "Get out!" over and over until everything went black.

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><p>I woke up again. I immediately wanted to go back to sleep, to pretend that this was all a bad dream.<p>

This time I wasn't blindfolded and I was lying on a cot of some kind, rather like a futon, and my left arm was bound in a sling. The room I was in looked like a more comfortable padded cell. The walls were blinding white and the door had no handle and there was a camera in the corner that could see the entire room and a speaker rested next to the camera.

My head pounded with the worst headache in my life; someone was sitting up there with a hammer just pounding away and to top it all off my stomach was sloshing around. My stomach flipped and I spotted a trashcan by the door. Two seconds later I was vomiting into it over and over. I almost didn't make it in time. After puking my guts out completely till I was dry heaving I collapsed on the tile floor.

Several minutes later I shifted and realized that along with everything else that was injured, my rubs were bruised if not broken.

The door opened and slammed into my shoulder.

"OOoowwwwww," I groaned. I hurt all over and now that hurt too. The cold floor was actually kind of comfortable. Soothing, really. Like an icepack.

Some guy stepped through the gap, jamming the door even farther into my shoulder in the process. I groaned again.

Jerk.

He started saying something when he stepped in. I got a good look at his shoes. Some big open toed boots, like somebody merged a pair of combat boots with a pair of sandals. He could have used a pedicure, too. He picked me up with his huge hands. I didn't offer much resistance as he draped one of my arms over his shoulder and half-carried half-dragged me out of the room. The hallway he took me through had several turns and staircases. I didn't try to remember any of them.

God, I could have used some painkillers right then. Hydros or Oxycontin would have been best.

Eventually we came into a large room with a beautiful picture window that spread around an entire side of it and had a huge wooden desk with an old man sitting behind it. Well, he wasn't that old, but he was pretty wrinkled and had several sunspots on his face.

The guy set me down in a chair in front of the desk. I looked up at his face for the first time and was greeted with a blank looking cat mask made of porcelain painted with a few utilitarian red lines and a smile that creeped the hell out of me. If I hadn't already been interrogated, exhausted beyond belief and lost with no recollection of who or where I was, I would have been very weirded out and having an Alice in Wonderland moment.

Hell, I was having an Alice in Wonderland moment even though I wasn't one hundred percent sure who Alice was.

The door to the office opened again and a tall blond-haired man wearing a pig mask that smiled just as creepily as the cat masked man walked through.

_Pumba_, my mind supplied. I'm not sure where from.

Something about him was familiar but I couldn't quite place just what it was. He walked in and exchanged a few words with the old man before standing stiffly in front of me with his arms crossed for a moment.

His hands and fingers moved, weaving with each other and forming strange signs and for a moment I was confused. Then, he put his hand on my forehead. Not a second later an energy spike split my head and I vomited again. Sounds and symbols flashed and I found that I was recognizing them, associating them with different things. How, I don't know. This confusion and weirdness was happening a lot lately and I was getting very tired of it.

Finally, the sensations ceased and I sat up in my seat and tried to blink away the black spots that were appearing all over my vision.

The old man in front of me said something, I didn't understand exactly what. He repeated his words and I lifted my head.

"For the last time, I _don't understand you!_" I whispered vehemently. I looked up at the old man with a tired look and he steadily returned my gaze. I looked away quickly, he practically exuded power and authority and I didn't want to get crushed. I flinched and ducked my head when the pig masked man put his hand on my shoulder.

A rustle of papers caught my attention and a sheaf of papers were pushed in front of me. The writing was all groupings of graceful symbols but somehow the symbols made sense, like they almost shifted into words that made sense in my mind but stayed the same on the paper. _The Village Hidden in the Leaves_, it was in my head, but on the paper said _Leaves-Hidden of Village_. There were more words than that but I didn't read further. I just stared at those three symbols. I guess that my reaction meant something because the two men started talking.

I brushed my finger over the symbols. There was so much that I didn't understand. How I got here, who I was, where I was from, why I was being hurt and tortured..

I blinked back moisture from my eyes and looked down at my lap again. I had never wanted to cry more in my life, but I felt that it would be ill received by these men. I held back the tears. Barely.

The two men talked in rapid words that flew completely over my head. I was done trying to understand what in the world was going on. They spoke for several minutes though by the tone of it the old man was giving all the orders. I offered no resistance when the pig masked man tugged on my arm not in the sling in an obvious command to come with him and did my best to limp out of the office. Almost all the way out of the office the pig masked man, tired of my slow progress, and slung my good arm over his shoulder. I hissed in pain when his shoulder made hard contact with my bruised (broken?) ribs. Once out of the office I was unceremoniously dumped into a chair in the waiting area. Immediately the blond man walked away and back into the office we had just come from.

The waiting room was a tasteful cream color, a desk at one end by the door where an attractive black-haired woman sat doing filing and sorting papers. Several chairs sat along the wall and there was a small table with chairs around it off to the side. Besides the black-haired woman and I, the room was empty and except for the rustle of papers coming from the receptionist's desk there was no sound. I don't know how long I was sitting there but my vision was getting hazy after a while of sitting there.

Just as I was about to fall asleep the door to the old man's office opened and the blond man walked out. From somewhere, I didn't catch where, the cat-masked guy who escorted me from my cell to here appeared. The two men faced each other but they didn't say anything, communicating non-verbally, I guess. After a moment, the blond man left and the cat masked guy come over to where I was seated and indicated for me to get up. Once I had pulled myself into a standing position he slung my arm over his shoulder and I winced at the pain again. He helped/dragged me back to my cell.

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><p>Calming chakra. That's what the medics who inspected the girl said.<p>

Could be a bloodline. Could be something else. The ANBU on duty reported that even standing outside the girls cell while she was unconscious made them relax a bit, although while she was under interrogation or duress the effect was not present.

Hawk had observed the girl for the last few days since the ANBU guards had realized the calming effect they were experiencing was from their newest 'guest'. So far, she seemed..

Inconsequential.

Her appearance explained only by a badly botched seal created by a Hidden Stone chūnin team that was quickly located a few hours after a chakra spike caused by the activation of the seal announced her presence. The Hidden Stone team was currently being tended to by Yamanaka Inoichi and his young apprentice, the Morino child.

Honestly, the girl had caused quite the stir with the Linguistics division of the Cultural Liaison department when it was quickly discovered that she didn't speak Japanese. In fact, the Linguistics experts were divided between whether or not the girl was speaking a language from a country from far to the East across the ocean or if she was speaking a dead language. A smaller faction within ANBU believed that she spoke gibberish, plain and simple.

It had taken one of the Yamanaka interrogators several hours rooting around in her head to gain a basic grasp of the language that she spoke and to determine that there was hardly a single stable memory that could be accessed before metaphorically tossing the interrogator out.

The girl had retrograde amnesia caused by trauma which made it near-impossible to get any information.

Amnesia caused by repression, a Yamanaka interrogator had informed him, could be blasted through by the interrogators' mind techniques and read like an open book but had an annoying side effect of ripping apart other parts of a prisoner's mind. Amnesia caused by trauma, however, made memories completely unstable because the cells in which the memories were stored were injured or in the process of being repaired. It explained a lot about why it was so easy to get access to memories in heads of captured enemy shinobi.

A mind technique used by the Yamanaka would hopefully give the girl knowledge of how to speak Japanese, but the technique was still in the experimental stages and mind techniques were tricky at best. Theoretically, there were several possible outcomes: it could grant the girl the ability to speak Japanese, it could give her a working knowledge of writing, it could mess up the language part of her brain, or it could do nothing. Time would tell but the couple of times that she had interacted with her guards since being taken to the Hokage's office she hadn't made any indication that she understood what was being said to her.

They would have to wait and see if the language barrier had been breached by the Yamanaka technique before they could question her further.

At any rate, the girl would have to prove herself useful in some regard or she would likely be executed. The Hidden Leaf Village couldn't afford to take in anyone and everyone who showed up at its gates. The war was just finished and there was rebuilding to be done.


End file.
